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James Hopkins '123'

James Hopkins
123
 


James Hopkins
123
2014
250 x 200 x 120 cm
Stainless steel and paint
 
 
James Hopkins Studio presents the launch of 123, a major new sculpture commission unveiled at Florentinum, Prague, Czech Republic.
 
The majority of Hopkins’ practice is concerned with the role of judgment in connection to the process of vision. He optically adapts the familiar in order to create sculptural interventions, which momentarily knock the viewer’s perception off-kilter.
 
His most recent sculpture ‘123’, is based on ascending and descending numbers, which play on the notion of fixing illusions through the isolation of the observer’s viewpoint. The numerals have been stretched, sculpted and carved in opposing directions, switching meaning when looked at from different angles. This permanent free-standing sculpture is a continuation of his interest in the ambiguity of the image and other scenarios which deceive the eye. The inherent visual trickery of ‘123’ confirms the visual puzzle and optical conundrum as Hopkins primary field of operation.
 
‘I consider perspective and the rendering of space in art to be the crux of artistic techniques and think that the most important link in the armoury of illusionistic art is the trick of perspective. I am most interested in how certain sculptures are capable of simultaneously representing several different visual interpretations. I find it most intriguing how our visual perception of such sculptures can switch between two or more alternatives and what the subsequent effect of perceiving a changing space of representation has upon our senses. When looking at my sculptures the viewer is made aware that each viewpoint holds something entirely different from the next. This confirms that no one viewpoint when looking at sculpture can be any more reliable than the next’.
 
James Hopkins
 
‘Hopkins's sophisticated visual illusions are engaging, but his best works also hint at the epistemological uprooting that follows from the discovery that sight, our most relied-upon sense in the gallery, can be untrustworthy. Few contemporary artworks consciously remind us of this fact; Hopkins links it to an examination of his objects' intrinsic characteristics, and, occasionally, to a meditation on the emotional fallout of this and other fundamental instabilities’.
 
Brian Sholis, Artforum
 
‘His highly focused practice has consistently addressed the perceptual aspects of the relationship between artwork and viewer. Producing objects, installations and public works that in their level of fabrication approximate processes of high-end mass production, Hopkins fuses the surface logic of the commodity with that of a fairground mise-en-scene. Arrangements of elements are carefully constructed to create slippages in perception, wherein the viewer’s confidence in what is seen shifts as their physical location in relation to the work changes. This “trickery” is employed in a manner that reflects on philosophical and psychological traditions related to the connectivity between vision, language and thought’.
 
Richard Birkett, Artists Space, New York
 
‘These variations on an anamorphic theme interpellate the viewer, and perhaps generate the same wonder and perplexity that the artist describes on first encountering the potter’s wheel. Shapes continually change, bounding and defining a central point in what Hopkins calls an ‘elastic band reality’.
 
Darian Leader
 
 
For further information contact: [email protected]
 
Links:
 
https://vimeo.com/74627782
 
www.jameshopkinsworks.com

 

MICHAEL JANSSEN, Berlin

Lili Dujourie
"Jeux de dames"
installation view, Michael Janssen Berlin
May 3 - June 21, 2014
Courtesy Michael Janssen Berlin-Singapore
 
 
LILI DUJOURIE
Jeux de dames
 
May 3 - June 21, 2014
 
Michael Janssen Berlin is pleased to announce its second exhibition by Belgian artist Lili Dujourie (b. 1941). Entitled Jeux de dames the exhibition showcases the central homonymous velvet sculpture from 1987, her complete early video works as well as the photographic series Oostende (Storm) from 1976.
 
Dujourie’s work includes video, collages, sculptures, installations and photography. She is a pioneering artist who created groundbreaking works in the 1970’s with her feminist performance videos.
In the 1980’s Dujourie started to make sculptures with velvet, which she usually draped over a built armature of steel and wood. The result displays the richness and complexity of a whole culture by folding its past into its present: it takes a framing device from the history of painting and puts it on the stage of contemporary sculpture in a leading role.
 
In Jeux de dames (draughts or checkers but literally Ladies’ plays, 1987) Dujourie stages an encounter between a flamboyant curlicue of blue velvet and an angular black screen of lacquered wood, standing on a marble draught board. The sculpture depicts a scenery that seems to have been abandoned by the female model. She is no longer posing and all that remains of her are her ornaments of velvety curves.
 
Édition de tête, 1972-1981 comprises 14 of her black-and-white videos created between 1972 and 1981. In them Dujourie created extremely intimate and captivating soundless moving images in ‘soft’, painterly ‘grisaille’; they all feature the human figure - usually herself - as a sculptural presence.
The open-reel tapes have been re-mastered for preservation purposes in 2002 and since then shown and written about in various contexts, and are now regarded “...as crucial for understanding how artists realized the potential of the electronic moving image at an early stage.” (in “The actions of bodies: approaching Lili Dujourie”, Anders Kreuger, Afterwall, Autumn/Winter 2013).
 
In her works Dujourie is continuously concerned with contemporary reinterpretations of themes, forms and gestures from art history, which is one reason why her many-faceted but dense and precisely articulated oeuvre is so visually and intellectually rewarding. In her articulation of minimalism and conceptual ideas, her works draw questions on the relation between matter and subject and how this relates to perception.
 
Her work has been presented at the P.S.1 in New York, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, at the Documenta 12, at the 2010 Sharjah Biennial and at the 2008 Gwandju Biennal. In 2005 a major exhibition (curated by Lynne Cooke) at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels was dedicated to her work. In 2011 Michael Janssen had a major survey with Dujourie in Berlin. In 2014 she will have a major survey at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren, Germany.
 
Lili Dujourie b. 1941 in Roeselare, Belgium. Lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. Selected exhibitions: 2011: Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin, Germany (solo). 2010: La Conservera, Murcia, Spain (solo); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (group), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (group). 2009: Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, UAE (group). 2008: P.S. 1. Contemporary Arts Center, New York NY, USA (group); MOCA, Los Angeles CA, USA (group); Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju, South Korea (group).
 
 
MICHAEL JANSSEN
Potsdamer Str. 63
D-10785 Berlin
Germany
T: +49 (0)30 259 272 50
 
MICHAEL JANSSEN Berlin-Singapore
 
Read On... Michael Janssen, Berlin

 

FOXY PRODUCTION, New York

Stephen Lichty
Untitled, 2014
polished stone and steel
9 x 10 x 10 inches
Courtesy of the artist and FOXY PRODUCTION, New York
 
 
STEPHEN LICHTY
 
10 May - 28 June 2014
 
Stephen Lichty’s first solo exhibition at Foxy Production comprises a new body of sculptures that give minimalist, iconic forms an expressive force. Lichty is interested in the transformation of objects and organisms through both actions upon them and their placement with other elements. These metamorphoses generate an allusive dynamic that often lies somewhere under the threshold of representation.
 
The artist places a cat that has undergone taxidermy upon a carved pillar of basalt. This juxtaposition is at first jarring, even startling; on reflection, cat and rock seem to follow each other’s contours in a kind of symbiotic physical relationship.
 
The animal’s very life-like presence makes it more than a memento mori: the work underlines how objects can generate not just retrospection, but how they also sustain their own energy in the moment. The work recalls ancient Egyptian statues whose role was to guard the deceased as they crossed into the after-life; they, like Lichty’s sculpture, are part of a system that transcends their individual identity, that is more iconographic than figurative.
 
Fountains consists of two parallel rectangular circulating pools of water. Viewers find themselves between identical long and narrow bronze trays, placing them physically within the dynamic of the work's structure. The simple elegance of the work’s design belies the many varied references it invokes: from domestic water features to grand public memorials, and from Duchamp’s readymades to the architecture of Mies van der Rohe.
 
Untitled is a black cube divided into very similar but still distinct sections: carved basalt is placed upon a block of oxidized steel. The work may recall the sculpture of Carl André or John McCracken in its spare form, although the subtle disjunction of its components, of their color and texture, contrasting with their shared mineral ingredient (magnetite) provokes questions about unity, repetition, and difference.
 
Cord consists of a braid of dark Japanese silk held tautly between ceiling and floor. The work is the most minimal of the exhibition, comprising, it could be said, silk and tension. Yet it conjures a range of associations that circulate without holding claim to it: from the history of silk; to the physics of its pressured structure; to its art historical reference, the yarn sculptures of Fred Sandback.
 
 
FOXY PRODUCTION
623 WEST 27 ST
New York, NY 10001
T: +1 212 239 2758
 
FOXY PRODUCTION
 
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Meyer Riegger, Berlin

Katinka Bock
Martinzùl, 2014 wood, fabric, salt dimensions variable (floor)
Ja (April), 2014 copper, rain water (ceiling)
Courtesy of the artist and Meyer Riegger, Berlin
 
 
KATINKA BOCK
FEBRUAR
 
02.05.2014 - 31.05.2014
 
A Conversation between North and February
 
N: My constant is space, my territory immaterial. But time envelops my limbs. It reaches out for me, while I lay my breath on it. Here I exist in a subtle way. The passing of time is inscribed in the discrepancy between two chairs, one placed on an island in a park for a certain time, weathered and dull-edged, it bears evidence of my presence, my gusting and secret hunting on its skin. I never saw the other one. Would they recognize each other?
 
F: Their togetherness is destined to last for a certain duration, this duration is my body, I surround them with my definition of time. I am just as caught up in the temporary as you are, but with the period of time that I impart in my invisible demarcation, I also provide space to stay, to pause. A viewer can linger.
 
N: You are traversed by a horizon line of bronze-cool branches, your borders marked, along the wall, the ceiling, the coordinates that encircle you here and now. The points that mark me remain in the realm of the non-visible, if one even grants me such measuring units. Despite the limitation and definition of place, time, space: I grow continually, as movement. Within a single day, a person can take on my characteristics, climbing up to a balcony and dropping matter from it. The result is shaped by calculation and coincidence, it carries my vibrating, oscillatory driving force, even if we may not see the action nor the material being moulded. It is like an open game.
 
F: I need these boundaries, the beginning and the end. Without any firm definition I would be lost. That which flows does not lie in my power. You move freely. I develop in the liberty of this cave and surface, which I embrace with my body. I harbour caves like this here too, allegorically shaped out of clay, with wood, cloth and other soft materials... plastic footballs that are crumpled or bit apart by dogs, found or traded. Their jagged form nestles up to my columns. My hollows are vessels for words. And then the open spaces, you spoke of the horizon. It defined the distance, the landscape, possibly even the border, where I may meet you, where our spirits convene. This blue sfumato line winds between stasis and its trembling dissolution in space. I feel close to you, kindred, although you make the end of my existence clear to me.
 
N: We are part of flux, we are processes. The transience of the moment and the limit of space; who would be we if they frightened us? They define us, just as we describe and fill them, as what they are and can be. The balls tell us stories, just like the chairs speak of reciprocal absence. Only their dissimilarity within sameness reveals their shared orientation. They connect the two of us, and yet they are completely themselves.
 
F: Warmth and cold, light and dark. Space, surface. Time, space. We bear all of this inside ourselves, we reveal it in the counterpart that comes close to us. You selected the performance, I the exhibition. We encounter our roles. Trying them out may soften and sharpen our eye for experiencing time and space as what they are. They are us. Somewhere, children play with balls outside, they do not ask about February and they do not ask about North.
 
N: Your horizon is the beginning of my act. We will meet again in May.
 
 
Meyer Riegger
Friedrichstrasse 235
D-10969 Berlin
Germany
T: 49 030 315 665 80
 
Meyer Riegger
 
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Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles

Nathan Mabry
'Heavy Handed (Flesh and Blood)'
2014
Cor-ten steel, aluminum base
55 x 63.5 x 109.75 inches, 139.7 x 161.29 x 278.77 centimeters
Courtesy of the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles
 
 
NATHAN MABRY
GOODGOD
 
May 3 - June 28, 2014
 
Cherry and Martin presents GOODGOD, Nathan Mabry’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will contain large-scale sculptures and wall-bound intimate sculptures offering further insight into his diverse practice.
 
GOODGOD is a formal exploration of ancient signs and symbols combined with references to current universal gestures, elements of popular culture, spiritual and mythological belief systems and art historical innuendo. Mabry’s long term interest in creation myths comes to the fore in this exhibition as one moves from the double-handed gesture of two tectonic minimalist Cor-ten steel hands that are locked in an unending embrace, to the ritualistically weeping fecund figurative fountain to polished bronze dinosaur skulls installed as silent mnemonic instruments.
 
In 2013, the Nasher Sculpture Center presented a solo exhibition, Sightings: Nathan Mabry and his work was selected for the Phoenix Museum of Art Artpick acquisition award. Mabry currently has the six-part sculpture Process Art (B-E-A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E) on view at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, GA. His work is in such collections as the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX); Vanhaerents Art Museum (Brussels, Belgium); Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA); 176 / Zabludowicz Collection (London, UK); The Rubell Family Collection, (Miami, FL) and Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY). Nathan Mabry received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.
 
 
Cherry and Martin
2712 S. La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
T: +1 310.559.0100
 
Cherry and Martin
 
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BEERS CONTEMPORARY, London

BEERS CONTEMPORARY presents
 
IN PLACE OF A TROPHY
 
Exhibition Dates: 11 April - 31 May, 2014
 
Vasilis Asimakopoulos | Leo Babsky | Olivier Kosta-Thefaine | Frank Maier
 

 
‘In Place of a Trophy’ presents forward four internationally based artists whose work evades any conventional reading of the object of art. The selected works present a conceptual understanding of the constructed environment; through a re-imagining of context and materiality, the works consider our relationship of space as imagined, evasive, and unstable.
 


Articulated through an unconventional and diverse array of urban materials, such as concrete, brick, wood and metal, the artists approach such unconventional materialization with a surprising, whimsical, and urgent nature, transforming objects that might otherwise be ignored or discarded to create a new temporal language: a landscape of spatial distortion, which (while reminiscent of its initial framework) reinvents itself and appropriates a sense of masquerade. Reused, reshaped and reinterpreted, each artist exhibits a distinct yet related body of work that can be understood archaeologically, as though a future civilization has embalmed and reinterpreted samples from our contemporary urban environment. Here we see captured street scenes, extracts of the metropolis, items of urbanity, artesania, and even kitsch, reinvented with museum-like dissociation, pseudo-scientific analysis, as though a series of cultural, socio-historic curio on display. Here, the viewer is reverted to passivity, refuted entry as though a museum visitor attempting to process the foreign objectivity that has been displayed. Non-descript rubble lying on the side of a pavement is magnified and printed on denim, disguising as painterly tapestry in Vasilis Asimakopoulos’s Knocking. Discarded cement blocks rendered useless at a construction site are presented by Olivier Kosta-Thefaine, as objects that should be reconsidered, redefined and treasured. Similarly, the ordinary metal grill of a security fence is moulded and transformed into neat, abstract and geometric patterns in Kosta-Thefaine’s Satrouville and La Gaubretiere and six framed spray painted works hang playfully alongside two forgotten bricks, reminiscent of graffiti sprawled on street corners and walls (Detail D’une Rue and Collection 1).
 


In the same vein, Frank Maier creates asymmetrical sculptural paintings from painted detritus: wood and string. Leo Babsky challenges the material aspects of contemporary life by combining every day objects and allowing the viewer to reconsider their appeal as new constructed and desirable entities: 'In Place of A Trophy' presents objects that are stripped of their original frameworks and uses, inciting us to reconsider our ingrained reference models. Marble, latex and ceramics, precariously stacked and balanced offer distorted mirrors of the every day. Combined, the works provide a new landscape with alternate potential, a glossy caricature of the real that serves to garner a new sensitivity for the static material world that surrounds us.
 

 
 
BEERS CONTEMPORARY
1 Baldwin Street
London EC1V 9NU
T: +44 078 1703 1766
 
www.beerscontemporary.com
www.re-title.com/exhibitions/beerscontemporary.asp

 

AEROPLASTICS, Brussels

HeHe
Fleur de Lys
2009
Installation
285 x 95 x 85 cm
Unique
courtesy of the artists and Aeroplastics contemporay, Brussels
 
 
HeHe
Anthroposphere
 
exhibition runs until March 15th
 
The duo HeHe (Helen Evans, 1972 and Heiko Hansen, 1970) personifies a new generation of artists who create a link between the sphere of technological/digital art (too self-referential, and frequented solely by the initiated), and that of contemporary art (reluctant to accept new modes of expression based on subverting new informational/communicational technologies). Each of these spheres has developed its distinct circuits of communication and 'diffusion', and common points of contact between the two remain rare. HeHe, winner of the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica (Linz) in 2008 - equivalent to the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennial for digital arts - regularly exhibit in locations dedicated to technological art, and extend their interventions into the public domain internationally (New York, Paris, Helsinki, Liverpool, ...). By mounting this first personal exhibition in Belgium, Aeroplastics offers the duo the opportunity to present their work in all its complexity, and to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of the themes they study and pursue.
 
These themes are essentially connected to the conflictual rapport between a humanity that is caught up in an unbridled quest for new sources of energy (along with new ways of wasting it), and an ever-increasingly fragile natural environment. On the gallery's first floor, two installations illustrate recent catastrophes caused by the exploitation of the main energy resources from the industrial age: oil and nuclear energy. Is There a Horizon in the Deepwater (2011) stages the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in 2010, while Fleur de Lys (2009), a nuclear plant plunged in an aquarium, evokes the dangers of atomic energy. Here, one naturally thinks of the Fukushima disaster in 2011, but there is also a manner of premonition: at its origin, the piece was conceived as being part of a series devoted to clouds (pollution) generated by human activity. The title Fleur de Lys harks back to the stylized form of the smoke plume emitted by the cooling tower, but also symbolically refers to France, a country 80% dependent on the atom for its energy needs.
 
This study of 'man-made clouds' gave rise to a spectacular performance in the public space, namely Green Cloud (2009), consisting of outlining and highlighting (by way of a directed laser beam) the fumes emitted from a power plant in Helsinki. The sociological and political implications of this project are manifold. In this vein, the prefecture of Seine-Saint-Denis prohibited Green Cloud being projected against the incinerator at Saint-Ouen, arguing that such would contribute "to propagating, in the public's mind, a strongly negative image of the incinerator plant"... And because pollution is only rarely visible to the naked eye: with a series initiated at the Centre Pompidou (Air de Paris), HeHe proposed to make visible the (mediocre) quality of the air we breathe via coloured photographed urban panoramas. Air de Bruxelles was made especially for this exhibition; the fixed image doubles as an under-construction internet site aimed to archive (in real time) atmospheric conditions as recorded by various sensors - or how landscape joins up with that of digital networks.
 
Naturally, every actor carries his or its own responsibility in this state of affairs. And although they defend against passing judgment on whomever, preferring the mise en scène (oftentimes humorous) to moralising, the HeHe pair don't miss targeting the current aberration of automobile traffic (particularly 4X4's) in city-centres (for that matter, HeHe is very active in projects to bring back alternative forms of public transport on the old Parisian intra mural railway line). The Porsche Cayenne, outsized, with its 189 grams per kilometre of CO2, is a perfect illustration. Launched in a miniature model producing a pink cloud through the streets of New York (Toy Emissions, 2007), and dressed up with a feather of the same colour (Porsche's Plume, 2011), it has nonetheless to take on competition from the Land Rover Discovery (269 g for the V6 Supercharged model), above all in its spatial variant (Beckham's one-way ticket to the moon edition, 2013)... And it isn't even necessary to drive a car in order to pollute. The simple fact of existing is sufficient: Million Parts (2008) converts the CO2 emitted by our human organism into modulated light within an enclosed space. "The set-up induces CO2 levels that surpass internationally accepted norms for enclosed spaces, indeed high enough for a last gasp!"
 
Finally, the series "Domestic Catastrophes" focuses on the pollution generated by objects we use in our daily lives, deliberately targeting the simplest among them (pointless to once again raise the question of cell phones or computers, regularly treated in the media): a wall-socket suddenly producing smoke that engulfs the room (Prise en charge, 2011), while a clothes iron, suspended from the ceiling, turns furiously in the air while belching jets of steam. Sometimes, a rise in the collective consciousness results in laws banning toxic substances from everyday life: for those who've forgotten what a room full of smokers smells like, HeHe have produced a delicate fragrance based on organic tobacco, Tobacco Perfume (2010). As for those who judge such laws to be anti-libertarian, they are invited to grill a cigarette under the Smoking Lamp (2005): their act will not go unnoticed...

 

Pierre-Yves Desaive
 
 
AEROPLASTICS contemporary
32 rue Blanche
1060 Brussels
Belgium
T: 32 2 537 22 02
 
AEROPLASTICS
 
Read On... AEROPLASTICS, Brussels

 

LUIS DE JESUS Los Angeles

Miyoshi Barosh
Feel Better, 2013
93 x 132 x 7 in (236 x 335 x 18 cm)
Courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
 
 
MIYOSHI BAROSH
FEEL BETTER
 
January 11 - February 15, 2014
OPENING Saturday January 11, 2014, 6-9 PM
 
In FEEL BETTER, her second solo exhibition of multi-media works at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Miyoshi Barosh focuses on the shift in responsibility from society to the individual to create and sustain meaningful lives and, concurrently, the way cultural failure has become internalized. Value, however, in Barosh's work is a "projection of ourselves onto things" like cute animals, mythic landscapes, cultural aphorisms, and the built environment. Her use of vernacular craft processes and folk traditions in combination with digital technologies contradict ideas about progress and technological determinism.
 
Her work Arcadia is an assemblage of accumulation, consumption, and destruction with its faux dimensionality as a folksy-crude parody of Tron and the landscapes of computer gaming in conjunction with home videos of cats from YouTube. In this mediated experience of nature, reduced to floral patterned fabrics and digitized kittens, animals are consumed as constructs of cuteness, an addictive escape to an interiorized "happy place." The images of the kittens reflect a culturally induced need for self-medication.
 
An extension of the ideas elaborated in Arcadia, I ♥ Kitties are layered, screened, Instagram-perfected reproductions of captured kitty heads, the new celebrity icons of the digital age, at once eye candy and hypnotic drug.
 
From a kind of interiorized form of self-medication to projecting out onto the landscape and built memorials, Monuments to the Failed Future refers to industrial capitalism's utopian promise of shared wealth. Barosh's models parody male-dominated power as represented by public monuments and projects. The individual titles within the Monuments series, for example, Model for the Monument to a Manipulative State of Well-Being is strident, manifesto-like in opposition to the inflated model itself. Each "model" is also depicted in situ on a digital photogravure print made from vintage postcards of scenic America: the projected landscapes of our collective national consciousness. Today, with the rapid growth of technological innovation, the assuagement of negative emotions has taken the place of any progressive social action. This, and the decentralization of power, has made the monument superfluous.
 
The title work, Feel Better, is a billboard-sized, large text proclamation exhorting readers to action: to affect emotional change. The inadequacies of this text to conform to higher graphic standards subsume its ability to accomplish that which it demands. With material, process, and text, Barosh makes work that is a manifestation of competing emotions around cultural conceits and identity.
 
"Through the intense materiality of language-as-sculpture, the work activates a kind of monumental craftsmanship that oscillates between the fleeting virtuality of a Facebook 'wall' and the timeless finality of a tombstone."
Annetta Kapon, BOMB, Fall 2013
 
Miyoshi Barosh is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist working in a wide range of materials and techniques including craft processes and found objects while exposing the socio-political underpinnings of American culture. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York and Miami, most recently in the exhibition Woman, War, and Industry, curated by Amy Galpin, at the San Diego Museum of Art, and Size Really Does Matter, at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Other recent exhibitions include Cheerful and Heroic: Eight Perspectives on the Art of Failure, curated by Lauren Lockhart, at Southwestern College Art Gallery, The Loop Show, curated by China Adams, at the Beacon Arts Building, Los Angeles, and We're Not Here to Waste Time! (Artforum Critics Pick) at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. She was also artist-in-residence (2010) at the New Children's Museum in San Diego, where she presented the monumental installation I am the one who will make a difference. As an editor and publisher, she has worked on booklength interviews with artists such as Vija Celmins, Mike Kelley, and John Miller as well as with writers Sylvère Lotringer, David Rattray, and Ralph Rugoff.
 
Miyoshi Barosh was born in Los Angeles, CA; she lives and works in Pasadena. Barosh received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts and BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She also attended Yale Summer School of Art and Music and Parsons School of Design Summer School in New York City.
 
Also showing concurrently in the Project Space: MARTIN DURAZO: SUB(VERSIONS)
 
 
LUIS DE JESUS Los Angeles
2635 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
T: +1 310 838 6000
E: gallery @ luisdejesus.com
 
LUIS DE JESUS Los Angeles
 
Read On... LUIS DE JESUS Los Angeles

 

Almine Rech Gallery Paris

William J. O'Brien
Untitled, 2011
Ceramic
16 1/8 x 18 x 9 in (41 x 45.7 x 22.9 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech Gallery Paris
 
 
WILLIAM J. O'BRIEN
THE LOVERS
 
January 9 - February 15, 2014
 
Almine Rech Gallery is pleased to announce 'The Lovers', the first solo exhibition by William J. O'Brien in France.
 
Prior to a major survey exhibition of the young American artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, this exhibition brings together a series of ceramic sculptures made between 2008 and 2013, and a series of new works on paper. This exhibition reflects the diversity of mediums and themes found in O'Brien's work for almost ten years.
 
William J. O'Brien is part of the return to ceramics in contemporary art, seen over the last ten years with artists such as Rosemarie Trockel, Thomas Schütte and subsequently taken on by a younger generation of artists. His ceramic sculptures reflect the extent of his vocabulary by developing complementary or opposite forms: they oscillate between matt and gloss, between anthropomorphic shapes with smudges and drips; as well as geometric abstraction reminiscent of Calder. The shaping hand always present, there is a primitive element that immediately stands out - whether referencing the grinning masks of the South Pacific or the plastic qualities found in the culture of native Americans. For O'Brien this is not an identity issue nor a tribute to a native history: the artist was born in Ohio, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, so his use of primitive forms is more akin to Picasso, Paul Klee or the Surrealists; taking an oppositional stance relative to a cert ain automated sophistication of form found in many artists of his generation. O'Brien's ceramic practice skillfully plays with this return to primary expressionism (it is curious to note that the artist was an instructor at a center for the mentally ill), a representation of the human sometimes flirting with the grotesque, but presented on pedestals made by the artist, an institutional device that is simultaneously perfect and ironic. This primitive and modernist dual heritage is also an important anchor in teaching at the Art Institute and on Chicago Art, which shapes the sensibilities of such artists as Nancy Spero or more recently Sterling Ruby. Indeed, one of the first group shows to introduce O'Brien was "Modern Primitivism" at the Shane Campbell Gallery in 2009. The Lovers affords us the possibility to understand the extent of his expression, both sensitive and informed.
 
Born in 1975 in Eastlake, Ohio, William J. O'Brien lives and works in Chicago. Recent and important exhibitions include The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS, 2012); Works on Paper at SHAHEEN Modern and Contemporary Art (Cleveland, Ohio, 2011); and The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago (Chicago, 2011). The artist's first major survey exhibition opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago in January 2014.
 
 
Almine Rech Gallery Paris
64 Rue de Turenne
F-75003 Paris
France
T: +33 (0)1 45 83 71 90
 
Almine Rech Gallery Paris | Brussels
 
Read On... Almine Rech Gallery Paris

 

Galerie Rupert Pfab, Düsseldorf

Helmut Schweizer
ATOMIC ELEGY . HARD - BOILED WONDERLAND Part I (detail), 1985 - 2013
mixed media
Courtesy of Galerie Rupert Pfab, Düsseldorf
 
 
HELMUT SCHWEIZER
MELANCOLIA. 8/6 - 3/11. A CHI DI COMPETENZA
 
11 January - 15 February 2014
 
"A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
[Walter Benjamin: On the Concept of History (1940), Thesis IX]
 
Galerie Rupert Pfab is pleased to present the exhibition Helmut Schweizer - MELANCOLIA. 8/6 - 3/11. A CHI DI COMPETENZA.
 
The concept and action artist Helmut Schweizer (*1946), whose subject matter is largely dominated by the natural sciences and their history, focuses intensively on the threats of nuclear technology and the way society deals with these. Like Walther Benjamin's "Angel of History", he looks into the past, which is determined by human civilisation and its technology, and in doing so exposes much of what was once considered to be progress as catastrophe. When it comes to his critical observations in the field of tension between nature, culture and civilisation, he is first and foremost merely a dedicated collector of facts with all their details. Inspired by this knowledge gained over the course of numerous decades, he then consistently develops new works of visual art, whereby his intentions are never moral.
 
Helmut Schweizer studied painting, philosophy and art history in Karlsruhe from 1967 through 1973, at a time when the Düsseldorf-based artist Joseph Beuys exerted a great influence on the discourse of contemporary art. Inspired by Beuys' actions, Helmut Schweizer was already striving to transgress boundaries in art and, to this day, continues to make use of the most varied media and materials in the aesthetic realisation of his goals. He creates complex installations and scenarios, within which the laboratory is a central motif. He combines early works from the 1970s which focused on the study of plants, exposing them to chemical processes and photographing them together with large furnishings, equipped with fragile glass containers. These held luminous, chemically reactive fluids and other ephemeral substances, which visualize time by means of oxidation and decomposition. Installation works such as these are combined with complex collages of images, colours and texts with references to important scientists of the 20th century, as well as music, literature and especially the visual arts. Helmut Schweizer quotes artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Caspar David Friedrich, Hieronymus Bosch and Giorgio de Chirico. In his recent works on paper, press images of the nuclear disasters in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima merge together with woodcuts by the Japanese artist Hiroshige and works by the Surrealists Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp.
 
The exhibition "Melancolia" in Galerie Rupert Pfab continues on the themes presented in the installation "Atemwende" (Turning Point of Breath), which Helmut Schweizer presented in the exhibition "LABORATORIUM" in the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg in 2010. In the first space of the gallery, he will also present one of his earliest works from the 1960s, "Berg & Wolke" (Mountain and Cloud), which forms a kind of prelude to the main installation. This work consists of a space lit with black light and equipped with glass display cases glowing with uranin, which both captivates and irritates the viewer simultaneously, as well as a large "laboratory" with furnishings and large-scale works on paper. Both spaces deal with the nuclear disaster of Fukushima as the tragic result of the discovery of atomic energy in the late 19th century.
 
Helmut Schweizer is represented in numerous international collections, including the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, and participated in the "documenta IX", curated by Jan Hoet in 1992, as well as other significant exhibitions in important museums. In 2010, the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg presented a comprehensive retrospective. He will also participate with a large-scale installation in the exhibition "Kunst und Alchemie - Das Geheimnis der Verwandlung" (Art and Alchemy - The Mystery of Transformation), which will take place in the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf in 2014 in conjunction with the "Quadriennale" of the State Capital of Düsseldorf.
 
Exhibition opening on Friday, 10 Januar 2014, 7:00 - 9:00 p.m.
The artist will be present.
Artist Talk in conjunction with the Düsseldorf Photo Weekend on
Saturday, 1 February 2014, 5:00 p.m.,
moderated by Dr. Dedo von Kerrsenbrock-Grosigk (Curator, Museum Kunstpalast)
 
 
Galerie Rupert Pfab
Poststraße 3
D-40213
Düsseldorf
Germany
T: +49 211.13 16 66
 
Galerie Rupert Pfab
 
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